Hacker News Reader

redbellon LLMs as the new high level language

As per Andrej Karpathy's viral tweet from three years ago [1]:

  The hottest new programming language is English

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1. https://x.com/i/status/1617979122625712128

redbellon Microsoft's Copilot chatbot is running into problems

> After leaning on its partnership with OpenAI, Microsoft is playing catch-up in the chatbot race. But data shows that it is losing ground with users.

This explains perfectly the annoying behavior when you search for ChatGPT using Edge. The top thing that appear to you is, well, Copilot and not ChatGPT! Tagged as "Promoted by Microsoft" and labeled as "Your Copilot is here", is clearly a weak move from MS to push Copilot as possible as it can despite its limitations in what it can do compared to its competitors.

At this current time, I think MS situation in the AI arena is not very far from Apple.

redbellon Teaching my neighbor to keep the volume down

This reminds me of this guy [1]

  My neighbor is smoking on the balcony, and smoke goes to my home with little kids. I talked with him several times, didn't help. It's his territory, so not much I can do, besides closing the doors. But at least i can use this fake smoke detector with VERY ANNOYING random buzzer. It starts buzzing when i connect to it my iPhone via BLE. Makes it not as relaxing to smoke on the balcony as it planned to be for him. I'm going to train this mofo with reinforcement learning like a fkn Pavlov Dog.

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1. https://old.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1ojv6x4/smokin...

redbellon Break Me If You Can: Exploiting PKO and Relay Attacks in 3DES/AES NFC

> Break Me If You Can

This, somehow, triggered my mind to recall LifeLock's CEO Todd Davis’s public marketing campaign where he displayed his Social Security number on the company website and advertisements to demonstrate the security of his platform, however, the challenge backfired dramatically and he becomes a victim of identity theft on at least 13 separate occasions.

redbellon Proton spam and the AI consent problem

Here we are! Day after day, I realize that even smaller tech companies suffer from or could not resist the temptation of Enshittification[1] once they start gaining some momentum. I feel this path had became inevitable since everybody is doing this, at scale. I barely could recall some names that stuck to their original motto over time.

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1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

redbellon Ask HN: Share your personal website

I'm a big fan of this project! I've been following it for years now. It was submitted a couple of times to HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29779753

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38830132

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088777

redbellon Briar keeps Iran connected via Bluetooth and Wi-Fi when the internet goes dark

> Note: If you are not sure if your device is Android, check the Play Store app. If available, your device is Android

I wasn't able to resist smiling reading this :)

redbellon Show HN: Gemini Pro 3 imagines the HN front page 10 years from now

That's a really fun little project that fits perfectly in the soul of HN.

Exactly three years ago, a similar post entitled Show HN: This Hacker News Does Not Exist (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33845946) made it to the front page but it was not AI generated.

I recall commenting (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33847522) with these fake titles:

1- Twitter files for bankruptcy (twitter.com/elonmusk)

2- Apple's new M3 chip outperforms Nvidia H100 (geekbench.com)

3- India to surpass China's GDP by 2025 (scmp.com)

4- Tell HN: I am quitting Hacker News

5- Google to revive Stadia (theverge.com)

6- Japan wins the 2022 FIFA World Cup (espn.com)

7- Hacker News to be acquired by Reddit (twitter.com/paulg)

8- Tesla Roadster hits 1.1 sec acceleration in early tests (electrek.co)

9- Microsoft outbid Adobe and offers $43.6B to acquire Figma

10- Facebook had died at 19 :)

redbellon OpenAI declares 'code red' as Google catches up in AI race

The current situation of OpenAI is difficult. At present time, even the giants (Meta, MS, Apple, AMZN) with deep pockets would find it extremely challenging to compete against Google in the AI race, let alone a VC-funded startup.

•Google has data, a lot of private data actually (YT, Gmail, Workspace, Search Queries.. you name it) •Google has a lot of money •Google has top-talented AI engineers (Eying on DeepMind & Demis Hassabis staff) •Google has a huge userbase

With $20B in ARR and hundreds of billions in funding, would OpenAI be able to make its own remontada as Google did? I'm not sure, but it would be a long challenging journey.

redbellon Samsung Z TriFold

The full review by MrWhoseTheBoss: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNKKSujit94

redbellon Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence

> Over the last few weeks I’ve been discovering problems that have been eroding confidence in macOS.

As we move forward, we're probably going to discover more hidden gems in the Apple’s ecosystem because, apparently, it's a serious crisis that is not going anywhere anytime soon.

You might be also interested in these related submissions:

Apple's Software Quality Crisis (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43243075)

What Happened to Apple's Legendary Attention to Detail?(https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45685551)

redbellon The Thinking Game Film – Google DeepMind documentary

Just watched it yesterday and enjoyed every second of it, the director put more focus on Demis Hassabis which turns out to be a true superhero and I have to confess that I am probably admiring him more that any other human in the tech industry.

redbellon Tell HN: Want a better HN? Visit /newest

Totally agree on this although I have to confess that I don't visit /newest frequently, this is a nice reminder!

Fortunately, the HN system has that feature called pool or second chance (https://news.ycombinator.com/pool) where mods periodically check then pick interesting submissions that were overlooked when posted and put them in the second half of the front page and see if the community finds them interesting. This happened to many of my submissions that I was surprised to see trending, sometimes after three days of submission where I totally forgot about them.

redbellon Show HN: We built an open source, zero webhooks payment processor

So, this is somehow similar to Polar (https://polar.sh/)

redbellon Gemini 3

> Drive vs Word

You mean Drive vs OneDrive or, maybe Docs vs Word?

redbellon Cloudflare Global Network experiencing issues

This Internet thing is steadily becoming the most fragile surface attack out there. No need for nuclear weapons anymore, just hit Cloudflare and AWS and we are back to the stone age.

redbellon Show HN: I built a synth for my daughter

> this was a bit of a surprise!

That's one of the coolest parts of HN! This post was posted five days ago and went totally unnoticed by the community, probably, even OP has forgotten about it. Thankfully, HN had what is called Second Chance (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26998308) and since this post is a masterclass in building a physical product, the mods decided to bring it back by featuring it on the front page, where it finally got the attention it deserved. A true masterpiece indeed!

redbellon Dark Pattern Games

These patterns do really take away the feeling of joy, fun and sense of accomplishment of playing games and replace them with pain, stress, fear and probably, every negative feeling you might think of. It's sad to witness the tragic shift from "pay to play" to "pay to win".

You might be interested to watch this video entitled Let’s go whaling: Tricks for monetising mobile game players with free-to-play: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4 , which has been referenced by many YouTube analysis, and for good reason.

Also, this paper was a nice read for me: Predatory monetization schemes in video games and internet gaming disorder (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325479259_Predatory...)

redbellon Supercookie: Browser Fingerprinting via Favicon (2021)

The urge to mine user's data in every possible way is being escalated to higher levels each day. We are, for sure, living in the data rush era.

Another interesting method for web fingerprinting explored by a team of researchers back in 2022 uses the GPU to create unique fingerprints and uses them for persistent web tracking. Codenamed 'DrawnApart' [1] and relies on WebGL to count the number and speed of the execution units in the GPU, measure the time needed to complete vertex renders, handle stall functions, and more. It uses short GLSL programs executed by the target GPU as part of the vertex shader to overcome the challenge of having random execution units handling the computations. Hence, the workload allocation is predictable and standardized.

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1. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/researchers-u...

redbellon Meta replaces WhatsApp for Windows with web wrapper

I feel this trend is going to stick for the upcoming years! It's not just Meta, every big player there is adopting this mentality.

Take Microsoft for instance, they have been pushing heavily what they called the New Outlook, which is basically a web-based client mirroring Outlook on the web (OWA) , packed into an EXE file (not sure if it is Electronized or not)! Then, they renamed the real native Outlook app as Classic Outlook to feel old-fashioned and outdated and as result, we ended up losing some core features that made Outlook, Outlook. We lose: COM Add-ins and VBA Macros, MAPI Support, Word as Email Editor, .PST File Support.. to name a few..

This would be probably one of the reasons contributing to the Collapse of Civilization (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25788317)

redbellon Steam Machine

Was going to post, exactly, this statement but found it is already spotted!

I just hope Google & Apple read, understand and follow this.

redbellon Show HN: What Is Hacker News Working On?

Nice work, thanks for sharing!

Here's my feedback..

1. Please, consider to always include the latest What Are You Working On posts. For instance, this latest one posted 16 hours ago is not included yet (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45869146).

2. Also, it may be better to include ONLY top-level comments and not replies. For instance, the second row appearing on the list says "Thanks for the the kind words.." by @rubansk is a reply and not a root comment which may be of a little value here.

3. For the UI, when I sort by columns "AUTHOR" or "POSTED", the table would take a different size?! It would be nice to keep the size of the table fixed.

Just my two cents..

redbellon Ask HN: What Are You Working On? (Nov 2025)

This is a lovely game!

This game was Show HNed two times in ten days, [1][2], but unfortunately, it didn't get as much attention as it should! Ironically, this current thread has already gained almost double the comments from both submissions combined!

I whish you best of luck to succeed in your journey.

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1.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45750789

2.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45634525

redbellon XSLT RIP

IMHO, Google had become the most powerful tech company out there! It has a strong monopoly in almost every aspect of our lives and it is becoming extremely difficult to completely decouple from it. My problem with this is that it now dictates and influences what can be done, what is allowed and what not, and, with its latest Android saga (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45017028), it's become worrying.

I strongly encourage building a website entitled, something like keepXSLTAlive.tld to advocate for XSLT as the other guys did https://keepandroidopen.org/ for Android (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45742488), or keep this current site (https://xslt.rip/) but update the UI a little bit to better reflect the protest vibe.